Path to Green Card eases for family members of US citizens/news07012012

Obama administration officials announced Friday that they will propose a fix to a notorious snag in immigration law that will spare hundreds of thousands of US citizens from prolonged separations from immigrant spouses and children.

The change that immigration officials are offering would benefit US citizens who are married to or have children who are illegal immigrants. It would correct a bureaucratic catch-22 that those Americans now confront when their spouses or children apply to become legal permanent residents.

Although the tweak that officials of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services are proposing appears small, immigration lawyers and advocates for immigrants say it will make a great difference for countless Americans. Thousands will no longer be separated from loved ones, they said, and the change could encourage Americans to come forward to apply to bring illegal immigrant family members into the legal system.

Illegal immigrants who are married to or are children of US citizens are generally allowed under the law to become legal residents with a visa known as a green card. But the law requires most immigrants who are here illegally to return to their home countries in order to receive their legal visas.

The catch is that once the immigrants leave the United States, they are automatically barred from returning to this country for at least three years, and often for a decade, even if they are fully eligible to become legal residents.

The immigration agency can provide a waiver from those tough measures, if the immigrants can show that their absence would cause "extreme hardship" to a US citizen. But until now, obtaining the waiver was almost as hard and time-consuming as obtaining a green card.

Immigrants had to leave the United States and return to their countries of birth to wait for at least three months and sometimes much longer while the waiver was approved. And sometimes the waivers were not approved, and the immigrants were permanently stranded, separated from their US families.

The journey toward the green card to which they were entitled was so fraught with risks for the illegal immigrants that many families simply decided to live in hiding and not apply.

Now, Citizenship and Immigration Services proposes to allow the immigrants to obtain a provisional waiver in the United States, before they leave for their countries to pick up their visas.
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